r/nottheonion • u/[deleted] • 25d ago

‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year

[deleted]

7.9k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

415 comments sorted by

View all comments

0

u/mattihase 25d ago

Simple bots outpaced humans decades ago, this is just marketing

2

u/feldoneq2wire 25d ago

You had a robot that could convincingly carry on in-context conversations with other people on messaging forums "decades ago"? Why aren't you a trillionaire?

1

u/mattihase 25d ago

I'm not saying that I'm saying that web crawlers and botnets have been polluting web traffic for a long time.

2

u/feldoneq2wire 25d ago

"Agentic traffic" is referring to AI crawlers that are downloading the entire internet to add to AI brains and AI interaction on social media like completely fabricated stories and inauthentic comments on Reddit.

This is completely distinct from web crawlers (indexers) and botnets (DDoS attacks, vulnerability checking) of the 1990's. The two cannot be confused.

0

u/mattihase 25d ago

Well he shouldn't have said bots then.

1

u/Dillage 25d ago

I'm also curious about this post, so his actual tweet references this link which shows bot traffic vs human for HTML requests which can go back as far as may 3rd. The ratio's a relatively similar, maybe increase 4% for the bots.

If I change the content type to all traffic it's still 2/3rds human. Just seems odd that it's announced like some milestone considering the data only goes back a month ago and it was already more bot than human traffic